Archive for May 2015

East Central Summer Internship

This summer the East Central Region will be working with an intern from Valencia College. Glenda will be learning about Public Archaeology through a project that will work to assist the ongoing Orange County Historic Cemetery Recording Project (OCHCRP). Glenda will be recording one historic cemetery in Winter Garden and throughout the whole process she will be blogging about her experience. Check out her first post here and be sure to check back each week as her project progresses!

When I tell people that FPAN’s core mission is to conduct
education and outreach, it always leads to more questions.—“Who do you educate,
how old are your students, how do you communicate archaeology to the public?”

My
answer always varies, but it ends up something like this:

“Well, we work with all age groups, from age 5 to 105. And
we focus on state and local parks, K-12 schools, and museums; basically
anywhere that has a vested interest in history, cultural resources, and
preservation is a good venue for FPAN programming. Our organization delivers
workshops, lectures, activities, and pretty much anything else we can do to
pass on our mission of heritage preservation.”

Therefore, I’m happy that we have this trading card game as
our newest medium for teaching about archaeology and Florida Prehistory.

Each player receives a board like this one, to keep track of their products and materials

The object of the game is to trade and collect natural
resources such as palm fronds, shells, bones, lumber, and then use them to
create tools and structures of Florida’s past. In addition you’ll need to
create one “special item” before your opponents do.

Of course in Florida, you'd want to build a mound!

Special Items include ear spools and pendants!

For example, it would
take 1 wood, 1 palm frond, and 1 shell to create a shell hammer. But, to earn
the coveted ear spools, you would need to get your hands on 1 wood, 1 bone, and
1 piece of (rare) copper. The first player to construct their village, forge
their tools, and obtain an exotic piece of jewelry wins the game!

Bones, Wood, and Shells, oh my!

“Village Trade” will be coming to a school, library, and
museum near you!!

Text and Images, Ryan Harke. Full credit to Tanis Montgomery
for illustrations and graphic design of cards and game box.

Archaeology, it’s a unique blend between
mundane and magical. Oftentimes people equate archaeology with the glory and
glamour of Indiana Jones or the adventures experienced in The Mummy. Though
life as an archaeologist looks and feels quite unlike Hollywood’s vision, the
work is never boring. What answers lie beneath the ground compels my curiosity
and imagination. The information uncovered through archaeology is exciting.
Finding objects made, used, perhaps cherished, by real people at some point in the past provides a sensation other
professions cannot. Working to know people in the past, to
understand them, to reveal their stories, and to share those stories with others
is, to me, immensely more interesting than Indy’s tales.

As
we prepared for the field season at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological
Park, we began with the mundane tasks in order to move toward the magical.
Our first week involved preparing the site for archaeology. We cleaned and organized
equipment. We decided where the screening station would be. We relocated our
datum points—established points that never move and that tie all of our units
together. We strung our units and we readied ourselves for digging!

We pull tapes to find more datum points.

Tapes, datums, survey equipment, and the crew

Unlike
past years, Dr. Kathy Deagan from the University of Florida decided to utilize
a backhoe to help strip larger areas for excavation and to save considerable
time. Kathy’s familiarity with the soil on site, and her analysis of non-modern
soil depths from maps made in previous seasons, helped her to determine how
deep the backhoe should dig. The machine stripped the sod and modern overburden
(or soil related to the 20th century) from two blocks: one 6 meters by 7 meters
(Block 1) and the other 10 meters by 10 meters (Block 2).

David, Tommy, and Janet remove sod to make an outline for the backhoe operator to follow.

Beep beep! The backhoe begins to work as Linda measures how deep it digs.

Kathy
selected the block areas for specific reasons. Research questions guide
archaeology and our interests were two-fold: first, could we locate units
excavated in the 1950s? We have records of the dig, but lacked enough
information to definitively tie those excavations into those completed by Kathy.
Second, could we locate features (soil stains) that relate to the
fortifications of the 1565 Menendez encampment?

Kathy looks on as the sod leaves Block 2.

With
two blocks created by backhoe, we faced the task of leveling these large blocks.
With shovels and trowels in hand, the crew began to bring the block areas to
the same depth. We battled through shell and slayed roots, large and small.

The pink string shows our first unit!

Janet and Linda schnitting as Tommy chats with visitors.

At
this point, the mundane and the magical merged. We traversed the land, finding
the tools we needed and marking areas we needed to know. We guided our backhoe
friend through careful, but massive, excavation. We measured and plotted. We schnitted
and troweled. We overcame nature to make our units square. With flat floors and
straight walls, we looked to the soil. There the next chapter begins…

The 2015 field
season spans six weeks and we’re in the middle of the fourth week. You can look
forward to more posts about the field season and our finds. In between blog
posts, keep up with the dig on the Fountain of Youth’s Facebook page or with the
hashtag #FOYarchaeology on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

For many people,
the most wonderful time of the year relates to a favorite holiday—presents beneath
the Christmas tree, an annual birthday bash, Mom’s Thanksgiving turkey. For me,
the excitement of a field season at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological
Park brings pep to my step and a twinkle of excitement to my eyes. Some people
dream of the aroma of Christmas ham. I dream of the smell, and the occasional accidental
taste, of dirt. Some people anticipate colorful Fourth of July fireworks and
their powerful, resounding booms. I anticipate dirt stains on my hands and
chatty peacocks. Some people countdown to dying and searching for Easter eggs.
I count down to the art of archaeological investigation.

Under the
direction of Dr. Kathleen Deagan from The
Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, archaeologists
began working at the Fountain of Youth (FOY) during the mid-1970s. For many
years, students learned about archaeology and excavating from Dr. Deagan at FOY.
In recent years, professional archaeologists began to dig at the site with Dr.
Deagan. For the past two years, I have been privileged to be one of those
archaeologists.

The 2014 crew goes strong into 2015. We miss you, Greg!

Archaeology is
scientific and excavations always seek to answer a research question. The 2014 field
season answered few questions, but raised many more. This partially led me to
my state of excited, archaeology-infused stupor. We would return to the site!
We would be able to answer our questions! I’d spend the day in the dirt,
finding features and artifacts! We’d have peacocks and peahens as company!
People visiting FOY would see archaeology in action! Field season at FOY—it’s
the most wonderful time of the year.

Sketch
map of units and features from 2014

This year the
dig will focus on two areas and our interest relates especially to soil stains,
or features. John Goggin, an archaeologist, briefly dug at FOY during the
1950s. Archaeology and excavation methods were immensely different at that
time. As Goggin’s team dug, they did not screen much of their dirt, left
features intact, and made notes and maps that will be helpful when tied into
Deagan’s excavations. In many ways, Goggin guides our current digging plans.
The questions that guide us include: where were Goggin’s units? If we find
features, are they related to the 1565 Menendez encampment? If so, are they
related to the encampment’s fortifications? Past digs offered much information
about the area in which the Spanish lived. Where was the settlement boundary and how did it look?

The 2015 field
season spans six weeks and we’re working toward the end of the third week. You
can look forward to more posts about the field season and our finds. In between
blog posts, keep up with the dig on the Fountain of Youth’s Facebook page or
with the hashtag #FOYarchaeology on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.Text and photo credit: Sarah Bennett; thanks to David Underwood for the last picture.

Into the Wild

One of our favorite colleagues, Nate Lawres, is out in the field for the next few weeks and offered to send dispatches back to those of us manning the desks so that we could show you, gentle readers, some of the great research happening in the state. Nate is a PhD student at the University of Florida and his research partner, Matt H. Colvin, is a graduate student from the great Anthropology Department at the University of Georgia. Their research holds a lot of promise to broaden our knowledge of monumental earthwork construction here in the state of Florida. Be sure to drop them a note if you have further questions (emails below).

Nate and Matt will be investigating earthworks in the Central/South area of Florida.

Over the course of the next two
weeks researchers from University of Georgia and University of Florida will be
beginning the first phase of a long-term research project on monumental
earthwork construction practices in the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades watershed. The first phase of the project is aimed at understanding
the temporality of monumental construction in the region by focusing on the
stratigraphic sequences of construction and the recovery of datable materials
through minimally invasive methods (i.e., coring, shovel testing, etc.) at
multiple monumental sites in the region, including Fort Center (Figure), Big
Mound City, and the Lakeport Earthworks (Figure) to name but a few.

One of the primary methods being
used is core sampling. The cores are
1.2-inch diameter clear sleeves that are hammered to an initial depth of 1
meter, with additional meter-long sleeves that can be added when needed. The clear sleeves allow a view of the
stratigraphic sequence immediately upon removal from the sediment, and when the
sediments seem to hold the promise of containing datable materials (i.e.,
charred botanicals, etc.) the sleeves are easily opened to remove a sample for
analysis.

The cores are
being strategically taken from different features of the earthworks in order to
provide insight into the temporality of construction (i.e., were all features
of an earthwork constructed around the same time? was one portion built first
and then added to at a much later time?).
This initial data set will provide the researchers with an idea as to
whether some of these earthworks were constructed as events or whether they
were continuously altered and added to over time. Additionally, by recovering data from multiple
sites it will provide insight into the chronology of earthworks in the region
and whether these constructions were temporally contiguous or not.

Over the next few field seasons
this project will be creating a regional chonometric data set that multiple
(and future) researchers can both draw form and contribute to in order to gain
a broader scale understanding of the archaeological record of South
Florida. In the long run it is hoped
that this regional data set will contain in-depth analytical details regarding
practices of monumental construction, ceramic production, lithic production,
material sourcing, and the patterns of movement (including both people and
material objects) throughout the region and beyond.